1. Field of the Invention
The embodiments of the invention generally relate to diagnostic systems and methods and, more particularly, to a diagnostic system and method for determining the root-cause of detected abnormalities in application workflows.
2. Description of the Related Art
In large scale environments, a storage administrator supports the requirements of multiple applications such as databases, web-servers, on-line customer transactions, decision support and supply chain analysis, financial applications. The end-to-end performance requirements of these applications are specified as Service Level Objectives (SLOs) that prescribe thresholds for maximum latency, minimum throughput, minimum availability, etc. Specifically, the storage administrator is required to continuously respond to run-time system-induced and human-induced events (e.g., failures, storage component overloads, changes in the input/output (IO) access characteristics due to changes in the application configuration, application or hardware additions, etc.) in order to ensure that the SLOs are being met. If one or more SLOs for a given application are violated, the storage administrator typically decides what corrective actions should be taken in response to the violation(s). To do this, the storage administrator must review an event log for the application invocation path components, determine the impact on the application SLOs of the events contained in the event log, develop a short-list of events that might have caused the SLO violations, and finally, decide the corrective actions that should be taken in response to these causal events.